National parliaments and EU Affairs Committees: notes on empirical variation and competing explanations.

This article examines the link between fifteen national parliaments and decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers. The main purpose is to provide a comparative account of EU Affairs Committees and the national advisory processes of scrutiny and co-ordination that occur before a national government takes an official policy position in the Council. However, the variation that exists among the fifteen member states also raises the question of what explains it. In the second half of the article, it is argued that explanations of the variation should start from the complementary aspects of major interdisciplinary schools of thought such as culture theory, institutionalism and rational choice. This leads to a number of interesting new research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]